PAP 004

The Poet and The Paupers

I.004


Outside Chiddingly, the Dictionary of National Biography gave him a short paragraph as a dialect poet and James Richard, Tunbridge Wells’s dialect poet of the 1920’s, linked his name with John Wesley, an act of juxtaposition that would have pleased a Dissenter like Richard: “De skool I’ve seen, at Muddles Green, Ware Dickie Lower teeched; Also de tree, at Winchelsea, Ware wunce John Wesley preached. Neither reference – to dialect poetry or to teaching – comes near to doing justice to the breadth of Richard Lower’s interests nor to the strength of his character. Nor does either hint at the miserable depths of servility to which poverty reduced perhaps as many as twenty-five percent of his neighbours during the first half of the nineteenth century. Not just for his poetry nor for his relationships with the rich farmers and the pauper’s of Chiddingly, but for his whole like, he deserves a much wider remembrance. To give it is this book’s justification. Shoreham-by Sea. Sussex, May 1980.

Outside Chiddingly, the Dictionary of National Biography gave him a short paragraph as a dialect poet and James Richard, Tunbridge Wells’s dialect poet of the 1920’s, linked his name with John Wesley, an act of juxtaposition that would have pleased a Dissenter like Richard:

“De skool I’ve seen, at Muddles Green,
Ware Dickie Lower teeched;
Also de tree, at Winchelsea,
Ware wunce John Wesley preached.

Neither reference – to dialect poetry or to teaching – comes near to doing justice to the breadth of Richard Lower’s interests nor to the strength of his character. Nor does either hint at the miserable depths of servility to which poverty reduced perhaps as many as twenty-five percent of his neighbours during the first half of the nineteenth century. Not just for his poetry nor for his relationships with the rich farmers and the pauper’s of Chiddingly, but for his whole like, he deserves a much wider remembrance. To give it is this book’s justification.

Shoreham-by Sea.
Sussex,
May 1980.

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